![]() Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.Īfter graduation Ms. When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister. Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.” ![]() Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.” “She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase). Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. “I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. ![]() Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug.
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